Air and Space Museum

[rootbeer]

I was on vacation for the last week or so. I went home to Virginia and spent a day at the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Museum near Dulles. I took almost 400 pictures with my trusty Canon PowerShot S3 digital camera. Would anybody care to see them? I plan on putting them up on photobucket in the coming weeks.

If you ever have a chance to go to this place, I suggest you make the effort. It is incredible!! They have an SR-71 in there, a 707, a Concorde, an F-14, a Hawker Hurricane (might be a Sea Fury-- not sure), a P-38, P-61, F-86 and many, many more aircraft as well as engines and a host of other things too numerous for me to mention right now. I also scored two pamphlets from the place which I will post on photobucket as they do not appear to be copyrighted. I was blown away, to say the least. I took an overhead picture of a suspended P-26, completely missing the Blackbird on the floor underneath it! I never saw it. Talk about stealthy...

If the opportunity ever presents itself, you must go!! Admission is FREE; parking is twelve bucks for all day. There are shuttle buses from the original A&S museum on the Mall in D.C. if you think you can hit both on the same day. Fat chance!!!

[bok269]

I was at the one on the mall two years ago on a school trip.  Not having caught the aviation bug at the time, and the museum being our lunch stop, I missed all of hte museum.  A real shame.  The AMerican History museum is surprisingly interesting as well.  I'd love to see yoru pics!

[rootbeer]

I'll get to work on them and hope to have them up in an organized manner in a few weeks. I took tons, some of which are duplicates. There is a 4350 cid, 28-cylinder radial there that has been cut away to show the innards. I am fascinated by this engine. I took plenty o' pictures of it. It is sectioned and painted to show the internal parts. I am amazed that such precision was attainable 50-plus years ago. Keep looking back here every so often. I'll get them culled and organized sooner or later. Then I will only need to know how to post them...

[elite marksman]

The Udvar-Hazy center is definatly a requirement if you are in the area of Washington DC. Though I believe that I read in the latest Air & Space magazine the shuttles from the Mall to the Udvar-Hazy center are being replaced by shuttles from Dulles.

[JA 37 Viggen]

The United States Air Force Museum at Wright Patterson Airforce Base is better. Same goes for the United States Naval Aviation Museum at Pensacola Naval Air Station. I guess it just the I like the USAFM's shiny Cold War aircraft and that they will have a MiG-29 soon.

[fighter25]

The United States Air Force Museum at Wright Patterson Airforce Base is better.

meh, It's okay.. Buuuuttt I do live 20 minutes away from it.

[JA 37 Viggen]

The United States Air Force Museum at Wright Patterson Airforce Base is better.

meh, It's okay.. Buuuuttt I do live 20 minutes away from it.

[flyboy 28]

The United States Air Force Museum at Wright Patterson Airforce Base is better.

meh, It's okay.. Buuuuttt I do live 20 minutes away from it.  :P  

Well its better than the New England Air Museum!

Is that the one outside Bradley International? I was thinking about hitting that one up on one of my trips to Maine.

[rootbeer]

Has anyone been to the one in Nebraska, not too far from Omaha? It's where SAC is based...

[JA 37 Viggen]

The United States Air Force Museum at Wright Patterson Airforce Base is better.

meh, It's okay.. Buuuuttt I do live 20 minutes away from it.

[Chris_F]

No mention of the Enola Gay?  That's probably the most historically significant artifact in that museum, isn't it?

The Smithsonian museums are really, really great.  The Air and Space is another not to be missed.  Take special care going through it though as some of their best items are not well publicised.  They had the original photo plates on which Pluto and I believe Neptune were discovered.  Those were just sitting in some cabinet somewhere.  They had pages from the Apolo mission notebooks and you could just see from the handwriting how difficult it was for them to write in 0g (probably slowly bouncing around the spacecraft while they did it).  They had one of the moon landing space suits with moon dust still ground in to the legs.  The engine from one of the Wright fliers had an uncerimonious place eleswhere in the museum.

Same goes for the American History museum as well.  For a contry as young as the US (with no real colonial history) the museums are very good.  But the British Museum and Library were better.  Granted the best items from those museums pre-dated the US by hundreds of years, so I guess the comparison is not really fair.  If you were to strip away all the stuff "aquired" during that country's colonial expansion then the museum would be a very empty place...

[rootbeer]

Yes, the Enola Gay is there. You can get right up close to its cockpit because there are walkways above ground level. The Gay is protected behind some kind thick glass right in front of it, no doubt to keep some anti-war, anti-nuke, long-haired, "sandals and beads," through rose-colored glasses type from throwing red paint on it-- or worse. If some schlub did that while I was there, I'd throw his worthless assets right off the walkway and claim he slipped. The bomb dropped from that plane's belly saved the lives of a million US GIs who would have had to invade Japan to end the war. The fight would have been brutal and bloody on both sides. It was estimated the fight would take at least a year or more. The bomb and the Gay did the world a big favor that August morning...


I did notice one glaring historical error in the Gay, however. I saw a black nylon zip-tie around some wires at the bombardier's station, on the left side of the airplane. Excuse me, but didn't zip-ties come out of the space program?